19.569, Calls: Comp Ling/Italy; General Ling/Canada

Tue Feb 19 15:56:11 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-569. Tue Feb 19 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.569, Calls: Comp Ling/Italy; General Ling/Canada

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Randall Eggert, U of Utah  
         <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: F. Okki Kurniawan <okki at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations
or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in
the text.

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at 
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 19-Feb-2008
From: Johan Bos < bos at di.uniroma1.it >
Subject: Semantics in Text Processing 

2)
Date: 18-Feb-2008
From: Meg Webb < margaret.webb at mail.mcgill.ca >
Subject: McGill's Conference for Linguistics Undergrads

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:52:55
From: Johan Bos [bos at di.uniroma1.it]
Subject: Semantics in Text Processing
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-569.html&submissionid=169945&topicid=3&msgnumber=1  

Full Title: Semantics in Text Processing 
Short Title: STEP 2008 

Date: 22-Sep-2008 - 24-Sep-2008
Location: Venice, Italy, Italy 
Contact Person: Johan Bos
Meeting Email: bos at di.uniroma1.it
Web Site: http://project.cgm.unive.it/html/STEP2008/index.htm 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 09-May-2008 

Meeting Description:

Symposium on Semantics in Systems for Text Processing.
September 22-24, 2008 - Venice, Italy 

1st Announcement and Call for Papers: Step 2008

http://project.cgm.unive.it/html/STEP2008/index.htm

September 22-24, 2008
Auditorium Santa Margherita
Venice (Italy)

Endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL special interest group on computational semantics

Motivation:
Thanks to both statistical approaches and finite state methods, natural language
processing (NLP), particularly in the area of robust, open-domain text
processing, has made considerable progress in the last couple of decades. It is
probably fair to say that NLP tools have reached satisfactory performance at the
level of syntactic processing, be the output structures chunks, phrase
structures, or dependency graphs. Therefore, the time seems ripe to extend the
state-of-the-art and consider deep semantic processing as a serious task in
wide-coverage NLP. This is a step that normally requires syntactic parsing, as
well as named entity recognition, anaphora resolution, thematic role labeling
and word sense disambiguation, as well as other lower levels of processing for
which reasonably good methods have already been developed. Accurate automatic
semantic interpretation of text is expected to benefit newly emerging areas
targeting semantic and pragmatic issues, such as affectivity and sentiment
analysis of texts, textual entailment, and consistency checking.

Workshop Scope:
The goal of the STEP workshop is to provide a forum for anyone active in
semantic processing of text to discuss innovative technologies, representation
issues, inference techniques, prototype implementations, and real applications.
The preferred processing targets are large quantities of texts - either
specialised domains, or open domains such as newswire text, blogs, and
wikipedia-like text. Implemented rather than theoretical work is emphasised in
STEP. 

In particular, relevant topics are:
- wide-coverage semantic/logical analysis of text
- computation and use of discourse relations
- use of lexical-conceptual and semantically related resources
- thematic role labeling in semantic representations
- word sense disambiguation in semantic representations
- implementations of specific semantic phenomena
- anaphora or ellipsis resolution in semantic representations
- implementations of sentiment analysis
- automatic detection of subjective and non-literal language
- acquisition of lexical knowledge and paraphrase from raw corpora
- background knowledge acquisition, representation, and selection
- semantic lexicons and ontologies for text interpretation
- learning semantic representations from raw text
- automated reasoning in the service of semantic analysis of text
- creation of gold standard meaning representations
- evaluation of semantic representations
- textual entailment and consistency checking
- systems that extract, represent or manipulate text meaning
- applications of semantic analysis in text processing

Applications include, but are not limited to, machine translation, text
understanding, question answering, summarisation, information
extraction, and the semantic web.

Panel: Comparing Semantic Representations
STEP 2008 will also feature a panel comparing semantic representations
as output by state-of-the-art NLP systems. Participating systems will
be given a small number of previously unseen texts. The output will be
judged on a number of aspects by a panel of experts in the field.  Aim
of the panel is to discuss the feasibility of a gold standard for deep
semantic representations. The panel will reward the system with the
most complete and accurace semantic representation with a special
prize.  This will be a special event at the workshop.

Submissions:
Authors are invited to submit original research papers. Papers should indicate
the state of completion of the reported results. Overlap with previously
published work should be clearly indicated. Submissions will be judged on
correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation, significance,
and relevance to the workshop.

Submissions should be in Abobe PDF format, not exceed eight A4-sized pages, and
be typeset in a 12 point font.  Detailed guidelines and a latex stylefile will
be available at the STEP 2008 web page. Each submission will be reviewed by at
least two members of the programme committee. Accepted papers will be published
in the workshop proceedings. The publication of selected and revised papers is
under consideration for a special issue in a journal.

Invited Speakers:
TBA

Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: May 9, 2008
Notification of acceptance: June 23, 2008
Camera-ready version due: July 25, 2008
Workshop: Sept 22-24, 2008

Organising Committee:
Rodolfo Delmonte (Universita' Ca' Foscari, Venice)
Johan Bos (Universita' La Sapienza, Rome)

Programme Committee:
Roberto Basili (University Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy)
Amedeo Cappelli (CLECT, Trento Italy)
Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge, UK)
Nicola Guarino (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
Sanda Harabagiu (HLT, University of Texas, USA)
Alexander Koller (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Leonardo Lesmo (DI, University of Tourin, Italy)
Katja Markert (University of Leeds, UK)
Dan Moldovan (HLT, University of Texas, USA)
Srini Narayanan (ICSI, Berkeley, USA)
Sergei Nirenburg (University of Maryland, USA)
Malvina Nissim (University of Bologna, Italy)
Vincenzo Pallotta (Universitaet Freiburg, Schweiz)
Emanuele Pianta (ITC, Trento, Italy)
Massimo Poesio (University of Trento, Italy)
Stephen Pulman (Oxford University, UK)
Michael Schiehlen (IMS Stuttgart, Germany)
Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh, UK)

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:53:04
From: Meg Webb [margaret.webb at mail.mcgill.ca]
Subject: McGill's Conference for Linguistics Undergrads
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-569.html&submissionid=169842&topicid=3&msgnumber=2 

Full Title: McGill's Conference for Linguistics Undergrads 
Short Title: McCCLU 

Date: 28-Mar-2008 - 30-Mar-2008
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada 
Contact Person: Meg Webb
Meeting Email: mccclu2008 at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 25-Feb-2008 

Meeting Description:

The Society of Linguistics Undergraduates of McGill (SLUM) is hosting its second
annual McGill's Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates (McCCLU). The
aims of the conference are to promote undergraduate research and to foster the
growth of the undergraduate linguistics community. 

Call for Papers

Please forward the following message to all linguistics undergraduates. 

McGill's Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates is still looking for
abstract submissions from students who would like to present a 20-minute talk
with a 10-minute question period on their research on topics related to
linguistics. 

McCCLU is also looking for students to participate in our poster session to be
held during the conference. The poster session is open to all student research
in linguistics. If you have written a paper or done interesting research in
linguistics but don't feel you could give a whole 20-minute talk on your topic,
the poster session is for you. We will also consider posters presenting research
that is still in its preliminary stages and may not have solid results by the
end of March as long as the expected results are stated in the abstract for the
poster

Abstracts for both 20-minute talks and for posters should be a maximum of
one-page in length and should be sent electronically to mccclu at gmail.com by
February 25th, 2008. If you would like to just be considered for the poster
session please indicate so in your e-mail. 

If you do not wish to present your research but would still like to participate
in McCCLU please join us! We will have professors Lisa Travis and Andrea Santi
as our guest speakers and have lots of fun events planned throughout the
weekend. Visit our website www.mccclu.com for more information. Online
pre-registration will begin soon! 

Thanks, 
Meg 
McCCLU Co-coordinator
margaret.webb at mail.mcgill.ca

-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-19-569	